Lydia Stone: "Dear Chuck Wendig: I need someone to impress me"

Dear Chuck Wendig: I need someone to impress me

By

Lydia Stone

            Honestly, I haven’t read fiction in a while. I spent most of high school deciphering textbooks and binge-watching movies with special effects. This fall, in my Speculative Fiction class, I finally read again, mostly science fiction and fantasy, realizing that what troubled and still troubles me are the stereotypes and predictability of novels. I want books to shock me into rereading a page or ambush me with something I didn’t know about myself, ya know, impress me.

            For example, much of fantasy fiction is like an elaborate mad lib: ______[ hero] starts out humbly, valiantly battles ________[trolls/dragons/orcs], falls in love with _______ [the beautiful], saves _______ [world]. This may be a consequence of the economic aspect of fantasy, as this algorithm often brings in publications and cash. This fantasy stereotype may also be a product of consumer taste. I admit, such familiarity offers a form of comfort to readers. I felt such coziness while reading Diana Wynne Jones’ Howl’s Moving Castle, a fantasy novel of a girl being cursed by a witch and venturing to a wizard’s castle for help. However, along with this comfort came predictability, and I consequently never had any exciting thrills or revelation moments. Although the story had everything a fantasy fiction is “supposed” to have, I could only bring myself to like the book, not love it.

What I ended up loving was Jo Walton’s Among Others, a novel written as the diary of a young girl, Mor, adjusting to life after her sister’s death. What really surprised and fascinated me was that although the book takes place in a magical world, the real magic of the story isn’t witches and pixie dust. In fact, the witches and pixie dust are just Mor’s initial way of explaining things she can’t understand. An outsider, Mor doesn’t believe that people can like her, thinking that the happy social events in her life are due to magic. However, as the novel progresses, increasingly more people join Mor’s life, and a different sort of magic (the real magic of Among Others) arises – friendship.

 I absolutely love (it’s genius) how Walton lures the reader in with an expectation of magical fairies and the classic hero’s journey, but ends up presenting an “unmagical” almost mundane life of a fifteen-year-old school girl reading books. But just when you think the fairies are just a red herring and Among Others is not actually fantasy, gotcha! Walton reveals that the book is magical, introducing the magic of friendship. In addition to highlighting such an underestimated form of magic, Walton’s method of bringing in the awesomeness of friendship is also incredibly not cliché.

Similar to fantasy, I’ve always considered science fiction to be the most annoyingly stereotypical genre. From Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to Jurassic Park, it’s always the same old story/algorithm: humans want power + humans mess with science and build almighty science-y entity + entity kills humans + oops! our bad = science fiction. The “nerd genre” is also centered on scientific laws and technological terms that only coders understand and care about. However, “Cold Equations,” a short story of a young girl awaiting her death on a spaceship, completely caught me by surprise. Belonging to a genre so seemingly strict and scientific, “Cold Equations” unexpectedly and fascinatingly reveals a lot about human nature. It brings to light our anthropocentric outlook on life. As the girl Marilyn awaits her inevitable death, she is almost in denial that such a tragedy is happening to her. We humans have this “that would never happen to me” mindset every day. Yet, just as the rigid math and science of “Cold Equations” nullifies these statements for Marilyn, we realize that we aren’t immune either. The universe doesn’t tolerate excuses like “I just wanted to ___” and “I didn’t know.” No matter how much we wish it were true, we humans aren’t all innocent or the center of the universe. This cold truth is as unsettling as it is scary, really making the book heartbreaking and unforgettable.

We live in an age where we question whether you can actually be creative and new, while being ordinary is 100% attainable. But the ordinary is what troubles me in life, fiction, etc. What interests me is breaking the stereotypical bounds of genres, revealing fears too scary to be on paper, etc. So there it is. I know it’s a lot to ask for… but impress me.